Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (84 page)

Our present Aryan Race, the Fifth, began to develop in northern Asia and then spread south and west. The fifth Sub-Race of the Fifth Race is our own Anglo-Saxon, and the germ of the sixth Sub-Race was already beginning to take form in the United States at the time that
The Secret Doctrine
was being written. Eventually the Aryan Race will be swept away; as Lemuria succumbed to fire and Atlantis to water, the Aryans will be undone by subterranean convulsions of the earth’s crust. According to H.P.B., two more races are due to appear before the end of the Fourth Round, after which present humanity will have reached the end of its alloted cycle of evolution. Then the life impulse will withdraw and our globe will be left in a condition of Pralaya. When will this happen? “Who knows save the great Masters of Wisdom, perchance, and they are as silent upon the subject as the snow-capped peaks that tower above them.”
⁹⁷

It was to be expected that
The Secret Doctrine
would meet with a mixed reception. For Theosophists, it was a new revelation; those with a mystical inclination, like
“JE”
hailed it as the most stimulating work they had ever read. Reviewers in the secular press treated it as they had
Isis Unveiled,
that is, patronizingly or humorously; the U.S. periodical
Science
went so far as to call it one of the finest contributions to contemporary humorous literature. The New York
Times
rendered its verdict with a review titled “Ten Pounds of Occultism” and declared that Madame Blavatsky could not expect serious consideration of her work because it was unreadable, incomprehensible, and literally choked to death by “vast quantities of indigestible materials... So esoteric is her method, if not her matter, we rarely understand Madame Blavatsky for a whole chapter, and sometimes not for a whole page.” The review went on to suggest that she “is one of those whom much reading of weird, wild books has made mad.”
⁹⁸

If the general press could not be bothered with
The Secret Doctrine,
H.P.B. knew by now that she could count on serious critical attention from William Emmette Coleman, who gave her a five-part, pamphlet-length review in the
Religio-Philosophical Journal.
The book infuriated Coleman, who was a member of the Pali Text Society and the Royal Asiatic Society and considered himself an authority on Eastern religion.
The Secret Doctrine
is, he wrote, “a remarkable work of a remarkable person,” but what made it so was its gigantic pretensions. While he could not truthfully question its author’s intellectual vigor and untiring zeal, he thought it a pity that her “masculine intellect” should not have been used for the advancement of humanity instead of this propagation of delusion and untruth. As soon as he glanced at the
Stanzas of Dzyan,
he knew there was no such book in existence, that it was only an invention of the ingenious Madame herself. “Of course Madame Blavatsky does not believe any of the nonsense she compiles and fabricates. It is only her credulous followers who are foolish enough to seriously accept as eternal verities the extravagant absurdities with which she regales their infantile minds.”
⁹⁹

Madame, he charged, was grossly ignorant of Eastern philosophy. Not only did she misspell certain Sanskrit words—although he admitted her spelling had improved since
Isis
when she misspelled
Bhagavad-Gita,
but she also made some six hundred false statements relating to Hinduism, Judaism, Chinese literature, Egyptology, Assyriology, and Christianity. These appalling errors about the most simple matters, such as the date of the Trojan War, demonstrated that her “mahatmas are as mythical and their vast libraries and their god-instructed wisdom as mythical as their own existence.” Coleman’s most damaging criticism, however, was devoted to contradictions between
Isis
and
Secret Doctrine
on such basic theories as:

1. Reincarnation, which in
Isis
(Vol. 1, p. 351) she denied, except in the cases of infants and idiots, was presented as fact throughout
The Secret Doctrine.

2. The nature of elemental spirits, which in
Isis
(Vol. 1, xxix) never evolved into humans, were described in
The Secret Doctrine
(Vol. 1, p. 277) as disembodied or future humans.

3. The septenary constitution of human beings. In
Isis
(Vol. 2, p. 367) she stated that they had six principles, but after going to India she learned they had seven. Actually, Coleman theorized, she got the idea of a seven-fold human from neither Buddhism nor Brahmanism, but from Paracelsus.

Even more devastating than Coleman was Oxford professor Max Muller, a distinguished Orientalist and translator of the forty-eight volume
Sacred Books of the East.
H.P.B., Muller believed, should be given credit for good intentions but

when we come to examine what these depositories of primeval wisdom, the Mahatmas of Tibet and of the sacred Ganges, are supposed to have taught her, we find no mysteries, nothing very new, nothing very old, but simply a medley of well-known though generally misunderstood Brahmanic or Buddhistic doctrines. There is nothing that cannot be traced back to generally accessible Brahmanic or Buddhist sources, only everything is muddled or misunderstood. If I were asked what Madame Blavatsky’s Esoteric Buddhism really is, I should say it was Buddhism misunderstood, distorted, caricatured. There is nothing in it beyond what was known already, chiefly from books that are now antiquated. The most ordinary terms are misspelt and misinterpreted.
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Between the Theosophists and the Coleman-Mullers, there were many who would agree with Maurice Maeterlinck when he wrote some years later that
The Secret Doctrine
was a “stupendous and ill-balanced monument” that combined “speculations which must rank with the most impressive ever conceived” with a colossal junkyard

into which the highest wisdom, the widest and most exceptional scholarship, the most dubious odds and ends of science, legend and history, the most impressive and most unfounded hypotheses, the most precise and most improbable statements of fact, the most plausible and most chimerical ideas, the noblest dreams and the most incoherent fancies are poured pell-mell by inexhaustible truck-loads.
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If only, Maeterlinck mused sadly, Madame Blavatsky had seen fit to give the world more information about the
Book of Dzyan;
if it were truly an authentic prehistoric document, her explanation of the evolution of the world and of human life would be “truly sensational.”

II

Sweet Mango

With
The Secret Doctrine
out of the way, H.P.B. continued to maintain the same work schedule as before. Even if she had wished to slow down it seemed impossible, and at times she felt like “a poor weak donkey full of sores made to drag up hill a cart of heavy rocks.”
¹⁰²

During the winter of 1888-1889, life was frequently so hectic that she could not find time to write Vera or Nadyezhda. When Vera demanded to know why she could not spare a minute to write, Helena answered with exasperation: “Friend and sister: Your thoughtless question, ‘What am I so busy with?’ has fallen amongst us like a bomb loaded with naive ignorance of the active life of a Theosophist... ‘What am I busy with?’ I, is it? I tell you, if there ever was in the world an overworked victim it is your long-suffering sister.”
¹⁰³
To begin with, the entire burden of editing
Lucifer
rested on her shoulders now that she had dismissed Mabel Collins, explaining away her absence as “a continuing severe illness.”
¹⁰⁴
Moreover, H.P.B. was helping to edit a new French Theosophical magazine,
La Revue Theosophique,
to be published by the Countess d’Adhemar; she was working sporadically on a third volume of
The Secret Doctrine
that would deal with the great occultists of all ages; preparing forty or fifty pages of monthly instructions for her Esoteric Section students; composing a question-and-answer-style manual,
The Key to Theosophy,
that would describe the fundamental principles of Theosophy; and “then I must also eat, like anyone else, which means supplying some other bread-winning articles”
¹⁰⁵
for her Russian newspapers.

At the same time she was doing a prodigious amount of research for her presentations at the Thursday meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge. “The people who come here,” she told Vera, “are no ignoramuses from the street,” but intelligent people who demanded intelligent answers. She was particularly careful in what she said because the Lodge had hired a stenographer to record her words and was planning to publish them in a pamphlet, “Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge.” So far as H.P.B. was concerned, they were spending “such a lot of money that my hair stands on end.”
¹⁰⁶
She felt secretly flattered, but it meant long hours at her desk wearing holes in the elbows of her sleeves and “sweating for everybody.” To maintain this taxing schedule, she drove herself mercilessly. Even for a healthy person, it would have been an immense strain, and to H.P.B. it was excruciating. As her renal disorder continued to worsen, Dr. Z. Mennell had been giving her six grains of strychnia daily, which provided some measure of relief.

Longing for emotional tranquillity, she wrote William Judge that “I am with perhaps a few years or a few months only (Master knoweth) to remain on this earth,” and went on to add that she was disgusted with almost everyone she knew. When she looked around at the London Theosophists, she felt sick at heart because all she saw was selfishness, personal vanity, and petty ambitions. Since it was against the Society’s rules “to live like cats and dogs,” was it any wonder that the Masters had retired into the background where they observed across “an ocean deep of sad disgust, contempt and sorrow?”
¹⁰⁷

As a matter of fact, much of the infighting and enmity was Helena’s own fault. After Henry had returned to Adyar, her letters to him were so hostile that he began finding them tiresome and wrote back vowing that if he received more “I should neither read nor answer them.”
¹⁰⁸
Their battle for control had broadened into a three-way struggle between Adyar, London and New York, and by now Olcott had wised up to William Judge’s two-faced politicking: Judge had sent the
Theosophist
a laudatory article about H.P.B., in which he declared that the Society’s real center of authority was wherever Madame Blavatsky might be; an irate Henry refused to print it in its entirety, but did hasten to set Judge straight by saying that, begging his pardon, the center of power was wherever
he
happened to be domiciled. Judge, he snapped, was suffering from “mayavic delusions.”
¹⁰⁹

As Judge was well aware, he had nothing to gain by supporting Olcott in his duel with H.P.B., while he could gain considerably from sticking with Helena. Indeed, she had made quite clear that the reward he might expect was to be named her successor when she died. Addressing him as “my
only friend”
she assured him that “you
are
going to replace me, or take my place in America.”
¹¹⁰
Actually she had promised the succession to a number of people, always in order to achieve some immediate end, and had no intention of naming anyone to take her place, but Judge was happily unaware of this. On the other hand, she probably did feel more kindly disposed toward Judge than anyone else, and it is possible that he truly may have headed her list.

During the past five years she had slowly come to appreciate Judge for the qualities that had once drawn her to Henry, obedience and willingness to work hard. She knew that when he had returned to New York after Adyar, he had thrown himself into reviving interest in the defunct Society by holding regular meetings to study the
Bhagavad-Gita.
He had founded a magazine,
The Path,
and had also published pseudo-translations of the
Giia
and of Patanjali’s
Yoga Philosophy.
By 1889, the American Section of the Society had thriving branches in half-a-dozen major cities and enough members to hold an annual convention. In December, when Judge visited Madame and she issued a special order appointing him her only American representative, some cynics at Adyar and in the U.S. began referring to him as “a sucking dove.”
¹¹¹
Judge did not care what people called him so long as he remained Helena’s favorite, and he continued to follow her instructions to the letter.

Despite Helena’s apparent support, Judge had a rival for leadership in America, and it made him nervous: after lurking in the background for several years, Dr. Elliott Coues had suddenly thrust himself forward as a contender for Judge’s position. When they had first met in 1884 at Elberfeld, both she and Olcott had been impressed. An extreme radical and free thinker in religious matters and an eloquent champion of women’s rights, Coues was the sort of highly educated, articulate professional that the Society liked. Like Allan Hume, Coues was a respected ornithologist, best known for his
Key to North American Birds
and his association with the Smithsonian Institution. Interested in psychic research for many years, he was a member of the British Society for Psychical Research and later would be active in the formation of the American Society for Psychical Research. A tall man of distinguished bearing and engaging urbane manner, Coues had a jolly sense of humor that appealed to Helena. He was enough of an amateur psychologist to recognize the route to Madame’s goodwill and, while a normally aggressive man, he had perfected the techniques of dove-sucking as well as Judge. “I think,” he once wrote her, “you are the greatest woman in the world, controlling today more
destiny
than any queen upon her throne.”
¹¹²